Liberal Donors Looking 6 Years Ahead

WASHINGTON — There was no ideological soul-searching, few recriminations aimed at political strategists, and little backbiting or assignment of blame.

Instead, the nation’s leading club of liberal philanthropists and political donors, gathered in Washington for a four-day strategy session, appeared ready to shrug off the drubbing Democrats suffered in the midterm elections last week, instead laying plans for what they hoped would be a long-term resurgence of progressive ideas.

Donors and officials involved with the group, the Democracy Alliance, said they did not believe the elections had fundamentally upended their assumptions about what Democrats and liberal organizations needed to do to regain power in Congress and state capitols — a significant difference from their counterparts on the right, who answered their substantial losses in the 2012 presidential election with a top-down effort to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party and the political capabilities of grass-roots organizations.

In a sign of how the passions of large donors have come to define the landscape of issues in national elections, alliance members are poised to expand funding to fight for climate-change measures and restrictions on money in politics. Neither issue galvanized enough midterm voters to sway pivotal Senate or House races, despite the tens of millions of dollars wealthy donors spent promoting them.

The alliance is also redoubling efforts to organize what it calls the new American electorate — Latinos, blacks, young people and single women — amid signs that the conservative tilt and high political participation of older white voters have given the Republican Party a significant advantage in midterm elections. The alliance’s president, Gara LaMarche, said it was not planning to expand fund-raising for Democratic “super PACs” and advertising-oriented outside groups, which spent tens of millions of dollars attacking Republicans in the last election cycle but have complained about being outraised and outspent by their Republican counterparts.

“I don’t think the way to read the election, tough as it was, is as invalidating the core truth of some of these approaches,” Mr. LaMarche said.

The alliance has more than 100 members, about 20 of them added in the last year. It includes major liberal donors like the retired hedge-fund founder George Soros and Tim Gill, the country’s leading giver to gay-rights causes, as well as top labor-union officials. Historically, the alliance has focused on building infrastructure for the left, such as the voter data cooperative Catalist; the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank; and Media Matters for America, which seeks to counteract what it considers conservative influence in the news media.

Most of the groups for which the alliance itself raises money are nonprofits that do not report their donors, making it difficult to assess just how much money the network accumulates. Mr. LaMarche said donations earmarked through the alliance accounted for more than $30 million in 2014. But alliance members, known as partners, have contributed at least several times that amount to progressive organizations operating in national and state politics, as well as to Democratic super PACs.

Dozens of consultants and nonprofit executives milled around the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Thursday, seeking money, ideas or both. In the lobby, an organizer with Ready for Warren, a super PAC hoping to draft Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts into the 2016 presidential race, kept her eyes peeled for big donors who might be persuaded to back the effort. In the hotel restaurant, alumni of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political operation caught up over lunch.

Ms. Warren, popular among many Democracy Alliance members, spoke at the start of a panel on Thursday dedicated to one of the alliance’s top priorities: building a more politically potent message around rising wealth inequality and the declining economic prospects of the middle class. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will speak on Friday at the closing-night gala.

The main focus this week will be a proposed six-year plan, titled Vision 2020, to rebuild liberal power in hopes of a Democratic resurgence in Washington.

The plan, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, sets out four goals for alliance-funded organizations: to motivate progressives, persuade independents, increase funding for liberal groups, and “divide the right and reduce its funding and support.”

The title is a blunt acknowledgment that Republican control of Congress is likely to provide few openings for ambitious liberal policy making in the final two years of the Obama administration. It also reflects the alliance’s belief that liberals are fighting on terrain largely defined in 2010, when Republicans won control of many state legislatures and governorships and used that power to draw safe districts for their party’s majority in the House.

Guests at the event described the election results as discouraging but not surprising. In an email, Chris Lehane, a political strategist for the billionaire Tom Steyer, said he thought Mr. Steyer’s spending on climate change issues had been effective in raising turnout among environmentalist-minded voters in states like Colorado, and in building activist networks in politically important states like Iowa.

“These conversations remind me very much of the conversations I had in 2004 about same-sex marriage, where there was a lack of understanding that social change is a longitudinal exercise but that it moves very quickly, and the party positioned on the issue is the party that benefits long-term,” Mr. Lehane said. “It is a sword to appeal to voters, like millennials, who will determine political winners and losers, as well as a sword to deflect the big-oil-funded Republican Party.”

Not all of the donors were satisfied. At a lunch session on Wednesday, Stephen D. Susman, a prominent trial lawyer based in New York and Texas, asked why pre-election polling had consistently overstated Democrats’ share of the vote, and joked about filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all the donors who had given to Democrats in the belief that they were within striking distance of Republicans.

“A lot of us gave donations to candidates because the polls convinced us we could make a difference,” Mr. Susman said in an interview on Thursday.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Liberal Donors Looking 6 Years Ahead. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe